Personalized iPad Mag Zite is Pushy, but Promotes Sharing

Zite, an iPad app that creates a personalized magazine of online content based on your interests and pushes it to you, is adding a new way for users to automatically personalize their news and adding more ways to share.

There’s been dozens of attempts in the past to create a personalized reading list for users — nearly all of which are now dot-gones.

But Zite CEO Mark Johnson, formerly of Bing, Powerset and Kosmix, thinks the rise of social sharing and the invention of the iPad has changed everything – at least when it comes to personalization and reading.

“We find stuff people can’t find elsewhere,” Johnson said, thanks to the company’s constant monitoring of social feeds like Twitter and Delicious.

On Thursday, the free app is adding the popular save-for-later reading service Read It Later, as one of its so-called “Cold Start” options — joining Twitter and Google Reader as the starting point for personalizing a magazine for you (you give Zite access to these services so it can mine your interests).

Users are also getting the ability to save articles to Evernote and Read It Later, as well as the ability to share them on LinkedIn. Those options complement the current crop of sharing options which include e-mail, Twitter, Delicious, Instapaper, and Facebook.

Those features are coming not just because users are asking for them, but because users share a lot of what they read on Zite.

“Twenty percent of users do some sort of sharing in a session,” Johnson said, with e-mail still being the killer sharing app, despite all the ink Facebook gets.

“If 20 percent are sharing, it’s almost like free advertising for publishers,” Johnson said. “And readers are finding content they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Zite grew out of technology built for the pre-iPad era and was previously known as Worio, which labored for years doing document classification.

“Worio had great technology, but a product problem,” Johnson said.

The system looks at more than 100 elements of a news story, including its tone and the size words used. Readers can add a range of interests — from surfing to taxidermy — and on average, users add 13 categories.

Then Zite picks stories that users might like, including those that overlap in categories, such as a story about ethics in sports, for someone who likes both philosophy and baseball.

“Push is a dirty word in the Valley,” Johnson says. “It shouldn’t be. Push is actually a good thing.”

Zite’s fellow travelers in the customized iPad magazine category includes Flipboard, which pulls in content via the links sent out by your social circle, and Pulse, which pulls in stories from publications you follow. Neither attempt the deep-data mining problem of suggesting things for people to read.

So far, Zite doesn’t include any advertising, but Johnson says it’s not very hard to imagine how the app could do very good targeted ads — and do so without angering publishers (read revenue share).